Wendy A. Bellion

Wendy Bellion is professor of art history and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art at the University of Delaware. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA and PhD from Northwestern University. Bellion has taught at Rutgers and the College of William and Mary and has served as Terra Visiting Professor at the University of Paris. Bellion has held fellowships with institutions that include the Library Company of Philadelphia; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art; and Winterthur. At AAS, Bellion held a Jay T. Last Fellowship in 2011-12.

In 2022, she led a summer seminar on the visual culture of nineteenth-century American theater for the Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture. Bellion’s research and teaching focus on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century art and material culture in North America and the Atlantic World.

She is the author of two books: Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019) and Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which was awarded the Charles Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She serves on the boards of the Biggs Museum of American Art and the journals Early American Literature and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.